Yesterday on Canadian national news channel CBC a spokesperson for EthicalOil.org floundered as she unconvincingly avoided the interviewer’s repeated question “Does Ethical Oil take money from Enbridge Pipeline?” The repetition of the question makes the whole interview very watchable – especially around 4:40 into the video. If EthicalOil.org do take financial support from Enbridge, it would completely tear apart their front as a “grass roots Canadian group” and show them up as actually being ‘oil-funded astroturf’. Enbridge are fighting tooth and nail against massive community-led resistance to their tar sands pipeline plans.Kathryn Marshall, the spokesperson for Enbridge, sorry, Ethical Oil, recently tried to use Platform analysis of Shell’s operations in Nigeria to support their promotion of oil extracted from the land of democracy, neatly sidestepping the fact that the international oil companies are the same companies whether they operate in Canada or Nigeria – or both, like Shell. Ben Amunwa of Platform wrote in the Huffington Post to reject all Marshall’s spurious claims: “Repression in Nigeria or Saudi Arabia is certainly worthy of condemnation, but it is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether or not we should be extracting tar sands, risking catastrophic climate change and devastating the environment and basic human rights of local communities in Canada.”
Never heard of EthicalOil.org? Read my Top 5 Reasons Why Ethical Oil is a Dirty Trick. Underhand manipulations are not new to the organisation – EthicalOil.org is registered to Ezra Levant (who is also author of the book ‘Ethical Oil’) who in 2010 was convicted of libel.
Ordinarily I’m reticent to join in laughing at a young woman when that means siding with two older men – its a tactic as old as patriarchy. Yet Marshall’s position is completely untenable and Ethical Oil’s program is twisted. She seems to have constructed her appearance to appeal to nationalist neoliberal Canada, in order to encourage Canadians to heedlessly support the profits of oil corporations despite local community resistance.